


Fallingforyou

by ercareyes



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, M/M, Michael in Love, Michael literally just loves love, Unnecessary Snow White references, idk the story starts when Michael is 5 and ends when he's 18
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 14:40:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7849018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ercareyes/pseuds/ercareyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael is five years old when he discovers his fascination with love. </p><p>Or alternatively: </p><p>Michael falls in love every day and falls out of love just as quickly. Calum is always there to catch him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fallingforyou

**Author's Note:**

> Remember that interview where Ashton said "Michael falls in love every day"? This fic has been a vague idea at the back of my mind ever since that day. I just love Michael with a lot of feelings and Calum just always being there. Title is from Fallingforyou by the 1975. Listened to this song so much while writing this at 4AM.

Michael is five years old when he discovers his fascination with love. 

He’s sitting in his living room with his parents and a few of his cousins. Snow White is playing on the large TV screen but he’s barely paying attention to it, his face buried in his Gameboy as he tries to defeat the gym leader in a Pokémon game. He’s only vaguely aware of the plot of the movie, some girl sweeping all the time and singing to animals. The girl was asleep the last time he glanced at the screen. It’s cute, he guesses, but not really what he’s interested in at the time. 

“Mikey, look! The prince’s kiss woke her up!” His cousin, Emmelia grabs his shoulder and points at the screen. And then he _has_ to look up at the movie, because that’s a ridiculous claim. A kiss can’t wake up someone who’s been placed under a sleeping spell. You can blame it on his extensive Pokémon knowledge, but he knows for a fact that the only way to break a sleeping spell is with some sort of antidote. 

He looks up at his mom for confirmation. “How did he wake her up?” He asks and his mom smiles down at him before saying “He kissed her, Michael. Haven’t you been watching the movie?” And, no he hasn’t, but that’s not really the point. That still doesn’t explain _how_ the kiss woke the girl up. She was under a _sleeping spell_. 

“Okay, but how?” He presses. His Gameboy is long forgotten, placed on the ground next to his feet, the sounds of a gym battle quietly playing in the background. 

“With love”. His mom clarifies and he feels like he’s learned the most important thing he’ll ever learn in his life. 

“Love can do that?” He asks, he needs to be sure. It doesn’t seem real. 

“Of course it can”. Emmelia answers before his mom can. “True love is the strongest form of magic”. 

Michael watches Snow White every night for two weeks before his parents hide the DVD from him.  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------  
Three months before Michael’s sixth birthday, he meets a girl at the park with a Band-Aid on her left cheek and blue-gray eyes that sparkle when she laughs at his jokes. She has a scraggly looking puppy that barks at trees and chases squirrels and Michael is sure he loves her. He tells her when she’s over at his house for a playdate a week later and they’re colouring pictures. She giggles and says she loves him too but doesn’t let him use any of the colours from her 64-pack of crayons when he asks; Even though he asked super politely, like his mom taught him. 

Michael decides he doesn’t love her anymore the very next day. 

He finds the Snow White DVD hidden inside one of the kitchen cupboards and wonders how Prince Charming was so sure that his love was strong enough to wake Snow White.  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------  
Michael is six years old when he meets Calum on the playground at school. Calum is covered in dirt from rolling around with a soccer ball all through lunch and he smiles at Michael like Michael offered to give him his 64-pack of crayons. Calum doesn’t care much for love or magic, and he’s never seen Snow White but he invites Michael over to his house to play video games that weekend. 

Michael asks his mom for money to buy Calum a 64-pack of crayons for his birthday that year.  
\-------------------------------------------  
When Michael is 11, he has his first kiss.

It’s inside a tube slide with a boy with dark green eyes and dark hair and Michael had been in love with him for at least a week by then. His name is Jason and he likes all the same bands that Michael does. He retells the entire story to Calum that night as they’re sitting in a blanket fort they spent 30 minutes making and perfecting. Calum makes a face at how Michael gushes through the story, but smiles fondly at Michael when he’s done with his retelling. 

“Sounds really nice, Mikey. So is he, like, your boyfriend now or what?” 

And Michael isn’t really sure _but_ he had the perfect first kiss and he’s in love so it’s probably only reasonable to assume he’s in a relationship now. “I guess so.” He answers after a beat. 

“That’s cool. What happened to Kelsey? Weren’t you in love with her last month?” Calum asks, but he’s already fluffing up his pillow, clearly ready to go to sleep. 

Michael grimaces. “I played her a Green Day song and she hated it”. 

“Definitely not true love, then?” Calum asks, his eyes already closed. 

“Definitely not”. Michael pauses, before saying: “Jason likes Green Day”. 

“He could be the one”. Calum says through a yawn, and his voice doesn’t sound mocking like Michael would expect it to considering how many times they’ve had similar conversations. 

Michael reaches over and shuts off the lamp before laying down on his pillow next to Calum. He says, almost as an afterthought: “You like Green Day too, Calum”. 

“Mhm”, is the last thing Calum says before he finally drifts off to sleep. 

Jason doesn’t even glance in Michael’s direction at lunch the next day and Michael thinks it _should_ make the memory of their kiss the previous day feel less romantic and perfect but it doesn’t. All it does is make Michael realize that maybe Jason wasn’t _the one_. But he did love him yesterday, and the fact that he kind of sucks today doesn’t really change that. Michael tells Calum as much and just shrugs when Calum asks him if he’s okay with it. 

When Michael sees Jason at the bus stop after school, he’s got a busted lip but he at least gives Michael the slightest head tilt before turning back to his friends and rejoining the conversation. 

“What happened to Jason’s lip?” Michael asks as Calum walks up to him with his usual bright smile. 

Calum doesn’t even bother looking over at Jason. “Who cares? He was a jerk”.  
\------------------------------------  
Michael dates a girl for three months when he’s 15.

It’s his longest relationship to date and he’s pretty proud of the fact. Her name is Jess and she has thick, curly hair and dark brown eyes that glint wickedly whenever he sneaks out to meet her at night. She’s two years older than him but never treats him like a kid even though he’s only in grade 10 and she’s about to graduate high school. Michael smokes his first cigarette while sitting in a circle with her friends at a college party that she let him crash with her. They make out for what seems like hours that night and Michael feels like he’s flying for the entire three months they’re together.

She breaks up with him a week before her graduation and for the first time since he was five, Michael regrets falling for someone. 

He crawls through Calum’s bedroom window the night of the breakup and practically throws himself face first onto Calum’s bed. 

“You guys aren’t going to do long-distance?” Calum asks, as he rests the book he was reading on the nightstand beside him and reaches his arms out for Michael. 

“No, we are not”. Michael says as he crawls over and lays his head down on Calum’s lap. It’s quiet for a while, Michael just staring at the ceiling and Calum combing his fingers through his hair. “Why do people do long term relationships? I feel like shit”. Michael speaks up, finally. He remembers the girl with the Band-Aid, Kelsey, and Jason and how great he felt in the short moments he had with each of them. But whenever he thinks about Jess, he has what seems to be an endless amount of great moments that all led up to one really bad one. It kind of overshadows all of the good. 

“How did you feel last week?” Is all Calum asks. 

Michael sighs. “On top of the world”. 

“That’s why people do long term”. 

He still falls in love fairly quickly but he doesn’t do long term for a while after that. He works on finding the perfect balance between the length of a relationship and maintaining the ‘on top of the world’ feeling.  
\--------------------------------  
A few weeks later, Calum goes off to Brazil for a soccer camp and Michael feels like the world crashes down around him. It doesn’t feel anything like when Jess broke up with him and he assumes that’s to be expected since he loved Jess and he doesn’t love Calum. And yet, somehow it feels worse. Michael’s mom talks to him for a while about codependency and maybe spreading his wings further than just Calum and relationships; maybe finding other friends to hang out with while Calum is off at camp. 

Michael meets Luke during the second week of Calum’s soccer camp and he doesn’t fall in love with him. Luke has blonde hair that he’s constantly brushing out of his face and sea blue eyes that shimmer whenever Michael laughs and Michael thinks that Luke is someone that he _could_ love but he doesn’t. And that’s fine. Luke is his friend and they play music together and post dumb covers on YouTube when they’re hanging out. 

Calum comes back the next month, and Michael feels like he can breathe again even though he hadn’t noticed that he /couldn’t/ before. Michael introduces Calum to Luke and the inseparable duo turns into a slightly less inseparable trio. 

Luke loves Disney movies and puts on Snow White one night during one of their sleepovers. Calum rolls his eyes and grumbles under his breath at first but watches with them anyway. Michael hadn’t watched the film in years but as he watches it again, he thinks about how the prince had fallen in love with Snow White, been separated from her for a year, and yet when he finally found her again his kiss was still able to wake her up. It seems vaguely familiar in a personal way but Michael can’t pinpoint which of his past relationships it reminds him of.  
\----------------------  
Michael is 18, touring the world with three of his best friends, and living the best version of his life that he could possibly imagine when he feels overwhelmed by love for the first time. 

He’s in the middle of a guitar solo in front of an arena full of people when he looks over and sees Calum smiling at the crowd and his breath catches. Somehow his fingers continue the solo even though he feels like the entire world is at a standstill. It’s when Calum glances away from the crowd and turns the bright smile towards him that he decides he isn’t going to think about it just then. And he doesn’t think about it for the rest of that song or the rest of the show, for that matter. 

It isn’t until they’re lying in the too small hotel bed, legs tangled together in the same way Michael’s had been tangled with someone else the previous night that he thinks about it. And it’s overwhelming because it’s /confusing/. Sure it had felt like the world had stopped spinning and every star in the universe had aligned when he had looked at Calum earlier but right now, lying next to Calum, he didn’t feel any differently about him than he had on any other day before now. But he doesn’t understand how that could make sense. So he asks the one person who’s always helped him make sense of his feelings: Calum. He asks him in the simplest way he can think of. 

“Do you think I was in love with Jess?” He asks, once he has Calum’s attention. 

He can sense Calum’s hesitation before he finally says, “I think you loved her, yeah. I don’t think you were in love with her, no”. 

“Jason?”

Calum turns over in the bed to face him, trying to read his expression. He sighs at whatever look Michael must have on his face. But he can’t help it, he’s starting to feel like his whole life has been kind of made up. “You were 11, Mikey”. Calum says as if that’s an answer. Michael looks at him pointedly. Calum looks kind of exasperated but answers “No, I don’t think you loved Jason”. 

Michael sits up suddenly, looks down at Calum. “What about Kelsey?” 

“What’s this about, Michael?” Calum asks, sitting up as well. 

Michael pauses before letting out a breath. “I think I might love you”. 

And Calum just looks at him for a while, before laying back down. “Okay”. 

“Okay?” 

“Yeah”. And then Calum’s smiling at him brightly, just as he always does. 

“What?” Michael lays back down next to him, feeling lighter suddenly even though he’s not sure why. 

“You said you think you love me. You’re not sure”. 

“I-“ Michael hesitates. It sounds like an accusation that he needs to defend but Calum is still smiling at him. 

“It’s a good thing, Michael”. Calum assures him “Every other time you’ve been sure and they were temporary”. 

“You’ve never been temporary”, is the only thing Michael can think to say. He doesn’t have to; it’s always been obvious to everyone that Calum is his constant. 

Calum nods his agreement anyway. “It’s always been forever for us”.


End file.
